A toast to the new year – and all the mistakes we made in this one

Forget the champagne toasts, the slowly dropping crystal ball, the exorbitant cover charge you’ll pay to sit in the middle of a crowded bar just to feel lonelier than you would have ever felt sitting home alone in front of the TV.

Let go of the forgotten resolutions you made last year as the room drunkenly counted down from 10.

Forget this year’s work mistakes, its speeding tickets, the Facebook arguments that ate up half your day for no damn reason. Stop ruminating on the bills you didn’t (couldn’t) pay, the weight you didn’t lose, the healthy habits that seem just as far away as they did on Jan. 1.

Forget the time your ex texted out of the blue and said, “I miss you.” Forget that three texts later, he whined about never having met “the one,” about never having fallen in love. Forget how angry you got. Forget that you told him he kissed like an elephant unsuccessfully trying to eat an apple.

Forget how drunk you got that night. Definitely forget how stupid you felt the next day.

Forget the weekends spent in bed, shades drawn and covers piled high, hiding from everything and nothing. Forget the depression that stole summer away from you, that made the sun’s relentless shine all the more unbearable.

Forget the suntan that never was. Forget the angry sideways glances from best friends who wished you’d just “cheer up.”

Forget the beer bottle you threw at a dumpster because a stranger told you your life seemed cool and fun. Forget how it exploded, and the silence that followed. Forget how badly you wanted to take that stranger by the shoulders and tell her the truth, the whole sordid truth, about the sadness and the mistakes that pile higher and higher every day.

Forget the texts you didn’t reply to, the big ones and the little. Forget the times you should have called your mom back. Try not to think about how your friend died in a sterile hospital room the day after you let work and self and life get in the way of visiting him one last time.

Forget the people who can’t forgive you and the ones you’d forgive if only you knew how. Forget typos and psychos and the man who viciously mugged your friend on Crockett Street, robbing her of $40 and you of your ill-gotten peace of mind.

Forget Obamacare and the fact that a misguided young woman wearing a foam finger got more media attention than all the world’s bleakest, most preventable atrocities combined.

Forget these things and go shopping. Buy a sparkly party dress, spend the equivalent of 3.6 hours at the job you hate on a dress you will wear one time — one time — before coming across it in your closet six months later and wondering, “What the —- was I thinking?”

Of course, you won’t forget all these things. You shouldn’t forget all these things.

They are a part of you that won’t go away simply because one arbitrary measure of time turns to another. All the champagne flutes and paper hats in all the party stores in all the world won’t make the things you did wrong go away.

But you don’t have to carry them anymore. You can choose not to cringe every time you think of that embarrassing night, that hungover morning, that boy who doesn’t love you anymore or, as it turns out, never did to begin with.

You are not alone in your transgressions. All around the world, people are marking the passage of time, the changing of the guard. All around the world, people are hoping that this year will be better than the last. That maybe we won’t make the same mistakes again.

Most of us will make those mistakes again at least once. We might make them on Jan. 1.

But it’s OK. Next year, we’ll stand in our uncomfortable heels and yell “Three, two, one” all over again, as if we expect something different to happen when the clock strikes 12.

But you don’t have to see that as a bad thing. You don’t have to suffer; though you can, if you want to.

You’re not alone, and you never have been. We’ll figure out how to become the better people we all want to be. Or maybe we won’t.